Adam Gopnik Quotes & Sayings

I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy. — Adam Gopnik

We pursued the muses, instead of the mirrors. — Adam Gopnik

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat. — Adam Gopnik

What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are - the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses. — Adam Gopnik

How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God. — Adam Gopnik

Can't repeat the past? We do it every day. We build a life, or try to, of pleasures and duties that will become routine, so that every day will be the same day, or nearly so, "the day of our life," Randall Jarrell called it. — Adam Gopnik

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough. — Adam Gopnik

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second. — Adam Gopnik

Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right. — Adam Gopnik

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more. — Adam Gopnik

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature. — Adam Gopnik

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive. — Adam Gopnik

A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it's in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That's the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful - they are goddesses - and yet a man must choose. And what was the chooser's name? Paris. C'est normal. — Adam Gopnik

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together. — Adam Gopnik

The sin of capitalism, perhaps, is to make wants feel like needs, to give to simple silly stuff the urgency of near-physical necessity: I must have it. The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic. — Adam Gopnik

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing. — Adam Gopnik

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. — Adam Gopnik

If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent. 'Credibility' is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we'll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one. — Adam Gopnik

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind. — Adam Gopnik

History is not an agreed-upon fiction but what gets made in a crowded room; what is said isn't what's heard, and what's heard isn't what gets repeated. Civilization is an agreement to keep people from shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater, but the moments we call historical occur when there is a fire in a crowded theater; and then we all try to remember afterward when we heard it, and if we ever really smelled smoke, and who went first and what they said. The indeterminancy is built into the emotion of the moment. The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping and the room was full. — Adam Gopnik

Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together. — Adam Gopnik

Big writers become a kind of shared climate. — Adam Gopnik

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private. — Adam Gopnik

There was a nook in the house that contained what they called the Turkish Room, which was for intimate conversation. And when my mother had her sixth birthday, her grandmother led her into the Turkish Room. They were both named Inez. And on that day Big Inez gave Little Inez a plantation all her own. Two thousand acres. Then her little sister came running in and said, "Grandmother, can I have a plantation too?" And Big Inez looked down and said, "Child, your name is Alice. You were named for your Yankee grandmother. Go ask your Yankee grandmother for a plantation. — Adam Gopnik

In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. — Adam Gopnik

[A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it's a good plan. — Adam Gopnik

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet. — Adam Gopnik

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper. — Adam Gopnik

I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this wonderful city, I'll go live there someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it
a distant constellation of lights I had not yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don't LIVE in Oz, do you? — Adam Gopnik

An assault on an ideology is not merely different from a threat made to a person; it is the opposite of a threat made to a person. The whole end of liberal civilization is to substitute the criticism of ideas for assaults on people. — Adam Gopnik

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life. — Adam Gopnik

parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass. — Adam Gopnik

The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small - to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways - to get it. — Adam Gopnik

We use the metaphor of waves that rise and fall in societies, perhaps forgetting that the actual waves of the ocean are purely opportunistic, small irregularities in water that, snagging a fortunate gust, rise and break like monsters, for no greater cause than their own accidental invention. — Adam Gopnik

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up. — Adam Gopnik

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense. — Adam Gopnik

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that. — Adam Gopnik

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections. — Adam Gopnik

This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch. — Adam Gopnik

Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. — Adam Gopnik

Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting. — Adam Gopnik

I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it. — Adam Gopnik

Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought. — Adam Gopnik

Whenever I am feeling blue, I like to go to the Balzar and watch a waiter gravely transfer a steak au poivre and its accompaniments from an oval platter to a plate, item by item. It reaffirms my faith in the sanity of superfluous civilization. — Adam Gopnik

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so. — Adam Gopnik

There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores. — Adam Gopnik

The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. — Adam Gopnik

There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the feelings. — Adam Gopnik

The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games. — Adam Gopnik

Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too
a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I grasped that the skyline was a sign that could be, so to speak, relocated to New Jersey
a kind of abstract, receding Vision whose meaning would always be "out of reach," not a concrete thing signifying "here you are." Even when we are established here, New York still seems a place we aspire to. Its life is one thing
streets and hot dogs and brusqueness
and its symbols, the lights across the way, the beckoning skyline, are another. We go on being inspired even when we're most exasperated. — Adam Gopnik

Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason. — Adam Gopnik

American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World — Adam Gopnik

The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination. — Adam Gopnik

You have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it. — Adam Gopnik

A fact about photography: we can look at people's faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states - for a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love. — Adam Gopnik

The coffee shop is a great New York institution, but it has terrible coffee. And the more traditional coffee shops are trying to catch up with more sophisticated coffee drinkers. — Adam Gopnik

...we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains. — Adam Gopnik

Oliver, success is usually a feeling of mere relief, where failure is pain. Happiness, you see, lies in neither, but in sticking to a daily ritual and becoming absorbed in something useful. When the war is over, even the greatest warriors do not exult. They go back to their garden or kitchen or library
or school
and resume life.
(as said by Mrs. Pearson) — Adam Gopnik

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser. — Adam Gopnik

I don't think there's any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that - that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics. — Adam Gopnik

Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum; the reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution perhaps the first modern political institution. — Adam Gopnik

All the media of modern consciousness - from the printing press to radio and the movies - were used just as readily by authoritarian reactionaries, and then by modern totalitarians, to reduce liberty and enforce conformity as they ever were by libertarians to expand it. — Adam Gopnik

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity. — Adam Gopnik

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs. — Adam Gopnik

Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality. — Adam Gopnik

It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed. — Adam Gopnik

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity. — Adam Gopnik

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share. You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers. — Adam Gopnik

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped. — Adam Gopnik

Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life. — Adam Gopnik

When you see a Gauguin, you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man. — Adam Gopnik

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense. — Adam Gopnik

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw? — Adam Gopnik

The romance of your child's childhood may be the last romance you can give up. — Adam Gopnik

This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy ... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and "The Wind in the Willows"
big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by "The Lord of the Rings" is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied. — Adam Gopnik

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them. I think if journalists start doing that then they won't be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won't be practicing satire. — Adam Gopnik

I love you forever' really means 'Just trust me for now,' which is all it ever means, and we just hope to keep renewing the "now," year after year. — Adam Gopnik

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking. — Adam Gopnik

A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is "South Park" - the hugely popular American cartoon show - and the things that the "South Park" creators have created, like "The Book Of Mormon," the Broadway musical. If I were a devout Mormon, I would be offended by a lot of things that go on in "The Book Of Mormon," right? It mocks mercilessly the pretensions to truth of Mormonism and the pretensions to virtue of Mormon missionaries. — Adam Gopnik

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch. — Adam Gopnik

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars. — Adam Gopnik

We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith.I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism. — Adam Gopnik

History, well read, is simply humility well told, in many manners. — Adam Gopnik

Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports. — Adam Gopnik

If you're being attacked from all sides, it's possible you're doing something right; it's also possible that you are doing everything wrong. — Adam Gopnik

Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment. — Adam Gopnik

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity. — Adam Gopnik

Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can't say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment. — Adam Gopnik

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship — Adam Gopnik

As we waited, I insisted that the reason government bureaus could seem so bureaucratic was that, by their nature, they have to be inclusive, and they can't inflict the basic market rationale of price differences upon their customers. If the privileged could pay more for quicker service, they would, but this would undermine the premises of citizenship. That first-class passengers get a shorter line through security claws at our idea of citizenship, which ought to include the notion that the rich and the poor suffer the indignities and delays of common civic cause equally. — Adam Gopnik

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down. — Adam Gopnik

That people don't speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical constancy is an absurd denial of what conversation is. — Adam Gopnik

Nasty Men Make Nice Things; Unpleasant People Think Important Thoughts is, after all, the headline on almost every chapter in cultural history — Adam Gopnik

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table. — Adam Gopnik

Wit and puns aren't just decor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program. — Adam Gopnik

I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write. — Adam Gopnik

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners — Adam Gopnik

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings. — Adam Gopnik

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist. — Adam Gopnik

All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd. — Adam Gopnik